The Winter Vault (26 page)

Often, Jean sat in the university library, waiting until it was late enough to walk to Lucjan's, 9 or 10 p.m., when she knew he would be finished in the studio. She emerged from the glaring brightness of the library stacks, from taxonomy, epiphytic genetics, Blaschka glass, and Minton wax replicas, into the dark November street, with its display of intimacies, amber windows filled with mysterious, ordinary, living. She and Lucjan had tea together, and if Lucjan had not quite finished working, he'd go back to it, rummaging for the right shape of metal, painting, soldering while Jean read. Then a last cup of tea, sometimes with a shot of something in it for Lucjan; and the climb to bed, where Jean lay in her clothes and each night for perhaps ten minutes Lucjan drew her face. There were now thirty or so portraits; quick, precise, loving. A record of his changing knowledge of her. Then the bedtime story that continued to unravel, both recognizing this for what it was, an agreement of trust. Egypt, Montreal, but mostly Warsaw, at Jean's entreaty. His words opened a dark radiance, phosphorescence in a cave. What was illuminated was not the world, but an inner darkness. Not the flower, but the tinctures made from the flower. Often they fell asleep still in their clothes, now not as if in a train station, but as if on a night flight; in the small bedroom window, snow falling like ash into the black Vistula.

One morning they woke and the house was cold, the windows feathered white. Lucjan went downstairs to start the fire. He used pages of old phone books as kindling, choosing a letter at random and declaiming names and addresses aloud before crumpling the pages. Jean watched, shocked.

– You feel tender even toward a phone book, said Lucjan. What am I going to do with you?

He squatted in front of the fireplace and looked at her.

– Why does it make you so sad?

– I'm not sure, said Jean.

She hesitated.

– Take all the time you need. We'll just sit here in the cold while you think.

I'm sorry, he said.

– It's as if there's a connection between those names that we'll never understand, said Jean quietly. As if something important is being disregarded.

Lucjan sat beside her on the floor.

– I remember my stepfather getting up early to light the fire in the sitting room where we ate our breakfast, said Lucjan. I never knew my real papa, who died before I was born. I was two years old when my mother remarried. She was so beautiful. Educated, refined, assimilated. She embodied an era, a moment, the first and last of the Jewish debutantes in Poland. My stepfather, who was not Jewish, stayed outside the ghetto and joined the Home Army because he thought it would save us. Those years when my mother and I were alone together, she talked to me all the time. We crawled under the blankets to keep warm and she told me stories, everything she could remember about when she was a girl and what it was like when she met my stepfather, always stroking my hair and making me laugh. After the war when he came back and found me, I could see the disturbance in his face – all the things he made himself do for us – for what. It was really only for my mother and now she was gone. He'd hardly seen me in almost seven years … We went through the debris, we carried half the city between us in our hands, stone by stone. He refused to believe we would not find her. He dragged me from place to place. We stood in front of one pile of rock after another, day after day. I was always crying. Until finally he shook me and told me to shut up. I must have been driving him mad. He said he was going to Kraków. He told me to wait for him. In the end I don't know whether the Red Army picked him up before he could return for me or not. For a long time I thought that single fact mattered more than anything. But many months later there was a moment when I understood he'd never intended to come back. I was working in the New Town, helping to empty truckloads of broken houses into the riverbed. It was raining. A man was nearly crushed under a load. He called out and his voice in the rain was the saddest sound I've ever heard. If rain had a voice, it would be that voice. At that very moment, soaked through, hearing that man cry out and out, I felt something fly from the very centre of me. My stepfather – the brave, noble, gentleman-soldier my mother had persuaded me to love – suddenly I was free, perfectly free of him. I can't express the relief such despair can be. Some time I'll tell you the end of the story … Don't look at me like that – that look of pity.

– It's not pity, said Jean.

– Well, it looks like pity to me.

– Would you recognize a look of pity?

For a long time, Lucjan said nothing. He sat on the floor in front of the fireplace, very still.

– No one has ever said that to me. You happen to be right. What experience do I have with pity?

– Please don't burn the phone books, said Jean. Perhaps it's foolish, but I can't bear to see those names burning. It's as if no one will be able to find anyone again. It's like breaking a spell.

Lucjan pushed the book across the floor into the corner.

– It's cold in here, he said.

– Come with me under the blankets, said Jean, please.

He climbed in and she drew his face close to hers. They lay quietly and after a while Lucjan said:

– You're right, Janina. All those names in a book as if they belonged together. As if the whole city was one story.

Avery's classmates, after their initial probing, lost interest in him. They turned their attention to intellectual domination in the classroom, the ascertaining of like minds, the acquisition of lovers; it did not bother him that he did not signify in any of these categories.

He felt ambition now. He had a keen memory for buildings he'd seen with his father and, from years of work, a pure, distilled instinct for stress, balance, shadows cast. Books towered around his bed on the floor. He slept with the lamp on and when he woke in the middle of the night he deliberately pushed the heat of Jean from his mind.

He lived on cereal, bread, and tea. For dinner, Avery set the teapot, the foil brick of butter, and the loaf on the table. The weather, the light, would awaken referred pain, details of her. The feel of her forearm up his spine, her hand between his shoulders. The warm curve of her, mornings she'd woken before him, lying contentedly on her side reading, his awareness of her absolute gentleness, even before he opened his eyes. At these moments, fear pressed him to end the separation. But, like two halves created by a single blade, there was a second fear informing his actions, which compelled him to forbearance, the fear of wasting his last chance with her.

In late November, during an afternoon of high wind and winter rain, Avery waited for Jean at the Sgana, a tiny café in a parking lot at the edge of the lake. He sat by the window watching as the old kitchen chairs and tables that had been left out since summer toppled against one another on the patio. No one brought them inside. The lake slapped against the concrete embankment. The café windows were glazed with water, and the wind came through the edges of the glass. Then she was at the door, her coat dripping, her wet hair under a wet scarf. As soon as Jean reached the table, Avery could see – though there was no outward alteration, he felt it at once – that someone else, another man, had changed the very look of her, changed her face. He had wished for this for so long, the hopelessness to be lifted, drawn away, and now it had happened, or was beginning to happen, the thing he had been unable himself to do.

They did not say much or stay long. It was unbearable to be so close to her and to feel this transformation. Avery could not describe it to himself. She was more beautiful to him now almost than he could bear. It seemed as though she had taken off something invisible and was, in every part of her, new and incomplete. She waited for him to speak. She asked, finally, close to tears, “Can't you tell me, what is it, what is it we should do?” “Not yet,” he said, “I don't know. No.” The smell of her.

Often the nights when Jean was not with Lucjan, the phone would ring and she would lie with Avery's voice pressed against her ear. He would talk only about what he was learning. But he spoke as if there were not a handful of city blocks between them but a mountain, an ocean, time zones, making every sentence count. When they hung up and silence descended, Jean ached from trying to understand what was important, whose need was greater, an excruciating inability to grasp the moral imperative, her task, the organizing principle of this derangement and longing. Some gardens are organized by taxonomy, some by geographic origins, some by feature. She knew that anyone overhearing their conversations, so steeped in context, would understand nothing Their urgency would seem, to a stranger, to be anything but; instead … almost desultory.

All through that autumn, Jean and Lucjan met late at night at the house on Amelia Street. Sometimes he undressed her in the doorway, at first, only for a moment, like a parent whose child has just come in from playing in the snow. His hands through her hair to release her beret, unwinding her scarf. Her sweater pulled over her head. Jean, who had known no other man but Avery, was compliant, resting her hands on Lucjan's shoulders as he rolled her tights down her cold thighs. The hot bath was waiting; music filled the darkness. When she stepped into the invisible water, it was like stepping into a voice. She did not know the names of the singers nor understand their words. But she felt the heat of it, women singing of love, every broken piece of it. The voice was the city, it was the Polish forest, complicated earth. It was the lanterns brought to the true grave at Katyn, it was a meeting on the fire-stairs, it was the silk that smelled of her, it was a hotel room in Le Havre, it was the last time. The almost unbearably hot water, the dark chocolate of a woman's voice. Lucjan's hands never asked any questions. He knew and he touched. He renamed her with her name.

The music was the boy with stones in his mouth, it was a woman on stage whose nakedness is her disguise, it was the black
gargara
, it was the ominous, body-sized, paper moth-bags draped over the arms of the sellers on Marszałkowska Street, the paper shadows, the paper souls, it was the smell inside a hat, the smell of gas leaking across the rubble, it was cloves and nutmeg before the bitter coffee, it was the smell of coffee in the dark, it was the stench of the
karbidówki
, it was the silk that smelled of her.